And while on the subject of confidence values and misuse of statistics in science, this should prove an interesting read: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/09/fetishizing_pvalues.html

This book has done a lot to help astronomy out, but much of the field is still lost in bad statistics. I ran some papers by a statistician and he agreed with me, the authors had no idea what they were doing and neither did their referees.

But it's getting better.